Building the Tree of Life: A National Resource for Phyloinformatics and Computational Phylogenetics

Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRES) project has concluded. It was an open collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation, led by Bernard Moret and Tandy Warnow and involved researchers (biologists, computer scientists, statisticians, and mathematicians) at sixteen institutions. An archive of the project website can be found here.

The goal of the CIPRES project was to enable large-scale phylogenetic reconstructions on a scale that supports analyses of huge data sets containing hundreds of thousands of bio molecular sequences. A group of researchers involved in phylogeny estimation, statistics, and computer science were assembled to create solutions for the difficult computational problems that arise in inferring evolutionary relationships. The project had a 5 year development plan (2003-2008) to create a national computational infrastructure for the international systematic's community.

While the project has completed, the infrastructure developed under this funding continues to support phylogenetic investigations. Ongoing projects include:

• The CIPRES Science Gateway: browser access to high end TeraGrid resources for phylogenetic tree inference
• TreeBaseII: a repository of user-submitted phylogenetic trees and the data used to generate them
• Crimson: database that facilitates the extraction of sub-trees from very large phylogenetic trees

CIPRES is a Collaboration of the Following Institutions:
American Museum of Natural History, Florida State University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Rice University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas A&M, University of Arizona, University of British Columbia, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, University of Connecticut, University of Pennsylvania, Univ. of South Carolina, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale University. xhtml | css